The New YorkerModify

There is a Hebrew word for “squeezed,” sachut, which also means “being played.” In Jerusalem, after more than a week of the war that the United States and Israel launched on Iran, that state of mind seems inescapable. In the German Colony neighborhood, where my family lives, the constant, low growl of fighter jets has become a kind of white noise. Schools are closed, as are restaurants that don’t have shelters, but banks and shopping centers are open at unpredictable hours. Day and night, smartphones deliver a tone, piercing enough to start dogs trembling, alerting us to incoming missiles or drones. There are fewer alerts now, but they come episodically. We then listen for a chorus of sirens, which means that a missile or drone is headed to our general area. The German Colony is in the city center, just a mile or so from the Al Aqsa Mosque, so not a likely target for Islamic forces. But if a missile is shot down overhead, large pieces of shrapnel will be falling.

When the sirens sound, we rush down to a dank shelter, once a water cistern, under our building. On the stairs, we might hear the deafening pops of the launch of intercepting missiles, followed by distant, staccato thuds—or, more ominously, sustained rumbles. About half of the roughly three hundred missiles fired at Israel by March 10th reportedly carried cluster bombs. In the shelter, neighbors banter or trade dark punch lines. After ten or fifteen minutes, we check our phones for an all-clear or reports of where warheads may have gotten through. Later, we listen to security pundits and military experts telling us which Iranian leaders or installations have been “eliminated.” But they offer no answers for the most important questions, and seem to think them academic to people running to shelters: What can be achieved by this war? How will we end it—and not soon have to refight it? Why was it even necessary?

Ostensibly, the primary reason for a preëmptive war is Iran’s nuclear program, which, President Donald Trump says, menaces the United States and Israel as well as their European and Middle Eastern allies. (Given Iran’s special animus for Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists, the threat is existential.) Connected to that is Iran’s ballistic-missile program. But the two programs are distinct and have different valence for the two partners waging this war.

The Iranian regime’s supply of enriched uranium that is believed to have survived Israel’s twelve-day attack on its nuclear installations last June—which Trump ended by employing B-2s to target critical enrichment sites (declaring them “obliterated”)—might eventually be used to make bombs. But, on March 2nd, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said, “We don’t see a structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons” in Iran. On March 11th, Amos Yadlin, the former head of military intelligence, acknowledged that Iran has had no active plan to “weaponize” enriched uranium since 2003. More important, there was another way to address the issue: a strict inspection regime, much like the one that Trump, at Netanyahu’s urging, walked away from in 2018. (There is also, critically, Israel’s second-strike capacity—nukes nested in cruise missiles and Dolphin-class submarines off the Mediterranean coast.) The day before the war began, the Omani Foreign Minister, Sayyid Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, who was mediating U.S.-Iranian talks, told CBS that a new nuclear deal was “within our reach.”

The missile program is another matter. Iran’s conventional warheads pose no imminent threat to the U.S., and their threat to U.S. bases and allies in the Gulf, which has become lethal since the start of this war, was only contingent before it. But, for Israel, their threat is tangible—and ongoing. Iran’s stockpiling of missiles portends wars of attrition, like the current one, in which each side tries to wear the other down. Thus, Israel—preëmptively or in response to attacks—aims to eliminate Iran’s missile launchers and vast production facilities; Iran aims to degrade Israel’s economic life and endanger international shipping. But neither side seems positioned to win a decisive victory.

Militarily, Iran appears to be at an obvious disadvantage. Its air defense was decimated in October, 2024—when Israel attacked after Iran fired missiles to retaliate against Israel’s aerial assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Lebanon—and then again in June. As the Times correspondent Mark Mazzetti has noted, “Netanyahu began to see the costs of going to war with Iran as lower,” which helped to “sell the United States [on] getting involved.” The assassinations of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many top officials in this war’s opening days may have seemed to confirm an accelerating asymmetry

But Israel is at other disadvantages. Its high-tech economy depends on advanced global networks, which are seriously disrupted by wars. Israel’s attack on Iran in June shuttered Israel’s non-essential businesses; it froze trade, travel, and tourism for a month, forced the cancellation of conferences showcasing Israeli startups, and temporarily shut down the country’s natural-gas fields. Schools were closed, as they are today. The wars have hastened the departure of some of Israel’s most educated people for jobs in American, European, and Australian companies, universities, and hospitals. (During the past three years of Netanyahu’s government, beginning with his assault on the judiciary and continuing into the prolonged war in Gaza, some two hundred thousand Israelis have left the country.)

Moreover, with Iran, Israel must patrol the skies of a nation that has a population close to the size of Turkey’s and a landmass roughly the size of Alaska’s with about two hundred aircraft (the number that reportedly participated in the initial February attack on Iran) that need to fly to targets more than a thousand miles away and be refuelled in the air. Meanwhile, Israel’s home-front command must shoot down missiles and penetrating drones that cost as little as twenty thousand dollars each with intercepting missiles that typically cost four million dollars and take far longer to manufacture. Besides, much of Iran’s missile-production infrastructure is deep underground, where most Israeli and U.S. bombs cannot reach. So the highest priority of Israel’s Air Force is to destroy missile-launch facilities on the ground; on Monday, the I.D.F. claimed to have knocked out perhaps eighty per cent of them. But, over time, they can be rebuilt and installed in new sites.

Prior to the calamitous war following the attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel fought five wars with Hamas, between 2008 and 2021. Vexingly, the war with Iran is reproducing in macrocosm what those wars taught in microcosm. “Look how quickly” Iranian security forces in Tehran are “taking on characteristics that resemble the Gaza Strip,” Ohad Hemo, Channel Twelve’s Arab-affairs correspondent, said on March 3rd. “Revolutionary Guards and Basij”—the volunteer paramilitary civilian force under the Guards—“are evacuating their headquarters, leaving their bases, and looking for cover in mosques and schools.” And their firing of ballistic missiles across Israel recalls Hamas’s firing of rockets into Israeli border towns. Israel’s response to those earlier wars, periodically “mowing the lawn” (as I.D.F. commanders infamously put bombarding Gazan installations, tunnels, and command posts), seems mirrored in the Israeli Air Force’s Iran campaign, except that now it’s undertaking to mow a distant pasture. And although Netanyahu kept the post-October 7th war going far longer than even prominent voices in the security establishment believed necessary, resulting in thousands more civilian deaths and many more of Gaza’s buildings and infrastructure destroyed, Hamas is still in power, with little ability to attack Israel, for now—but enough to intimidate Gazans. There is a lesson here, too.

One might have concluded, given Israel’s predictable jeopardy, that a diplomatic initiative to prevent this war would have been tried long ago. In March, 2022, before Netanyahu regained power, then Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted a summit in Israel with the Abraham Accord signatories Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco, reportedly with Saudi blessing. The leaders explored, among other things, something along the lines of a Middle Eastern NATO, to contain Iran. But a process of this kind has always meant engaging the Palestine Authority and entertaining a pathway to a Palestinian state, and that has meant abandoning annexation of the West Bank—a prospect that is anathema to Israel’s religious extremists, who are now settling what they call Judea and Samaria, and with whom Netanyahu has been allied since he began his career.

The choice of war, however, requires a U.S. partnership of a different kind, because Israel cannot stand against Iran alone. Trump seems aligned for now, though it’s not clear that he’s signed up to get Israel out of the specific danger of wars of attrition. Facing mounting opposition at home, and increasingly pressured oil markets, it’s not clear that he’ll stick to anything other than what appeals to his capricious, self-aggrandizing impulses. In January, after all, Trump encouraged Iranian protesters to come out in force, posting that “help is on the way.” (The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Iran estimated that at least five thousand people were killed by Iranian security forces during the protests, and, according to medical sources she consulted, as many as twenty thousand.) A month later, his idea of help, apparently, is the extensive bombing of the country in which, according to Iran’s U.N. envoy, thirteen hundred civilians have been killed, along with a demand for “unconditional surrender.” Trump also called for the intervention of Kurdish forces from Iraq, then changed his mind.

Nevertheless, the selection of Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father as Supreme Leader suggests that, however questionable his ability to reëstablish a chain of command, the hard-liners in the regime are doubling down. Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian, hinted that some countries have begun “mediation efforts” to end the war. That could be a chance for Trump to declare victory and leave. “This was just an excursion into something that had to be done,” he said in a press conference on Monday. “We’re getting very close to finishing that, too.” And this: “Our enemies see what price we exact for aggression against us, I’m sure they’ll draw the conclusion.”

Actually, that last statement was not from Trump on Monday but from Netanyahu in May, 2021, at the close of that war with Hamas—more than two years before October 7th. Trump may keep shifting objectives, but for Netanyahu the inexorable goal still seems to be regime change, much the way that “total victory” against Hamas has been. For the Prime Minister, existential war is on brand. “A few months ago, Netanyahu described Israel as a modern Sparta,” the Haaretz security correspondent Amos Harel wrote on Monday. “But to preserve its militarist identity, a Sparta requires permanent military friction.”

“Bibi postures as Churchill,” the veteran journalist Eliezer Yaari—a former combat pilot—told me. “Cigars in hand—blood, sweat, and tears until the imaginary ‘absolute victory.’ In Jerusalem, we have relative quiet since the war broke out. But I speak with my children in Tel Aviv, and with friends running to shelters five times a night. They don’t feel like Spartans. They feel the anxiety of enduring this for weeks and months on end.” ♦

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen

Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox.

When Chloé Zhao won an Oscar for Best Director, for “Nomadland,” from 2020, she was only the second woman to do so. She is nominated once again for “Hamnet,” starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, the film follows a young William Shakespeare and his wife, and their grief at the loss of their only son. “Hamnet” is also nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress, and five other awards. In a conversation with Michael Schulman, Zhao talked about the origins of “Hamnet,” the centrality of nature imagery in her work, and how the I.P. in a Marvel film is not so different from adapting a literary novel.

This segment originally aired on December 5, 2025.

Further reading:

• “Chloé Zhao Has Looked Into the Void,” by Michael Schulman

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen

Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox.

The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once said that a poet is someone who “manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.” Jonathan Haidt, in his career as a wide-ranging social psychologist, has been flagrantly right about at least one big thing. His book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” was a best-seller when it was published two years ago and its influence has hardly waned. As both a researcher and as a popularizer, Haidt argues that social-media companies have unleashed what is essentially a “mind-altering” danger in our lives—particularly in the lives of kids.

At first, Haidt’s work met with some critical eye-rolling, partly because a few in the field believed that he had not quite nailed one assertion or another, but more commonly because he seemed to some an alarmist, a techno-Luddite whinging about “kids these days and their devices.” But as the evidence of the harms accumulated—of social disconnection, of a sharp decline in mental health among young people—Haidt’s book became, for so many, essential.

I last met with Haidt for The New Yorker Radio Hour when his book was published. I wanted to catch up with him to review the political and social ramifications of his work from here to Australia and his own turn from scholar to activist. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Jonathan, I really wanted to have you back. We had a wonderful conversation a couple years ago, and you’ve done a lot of work since then. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, too, I must admit, and I’m not alone. Your book has been cited as part of the inspiration for some new laws that are trying to shield children from social media. As we all know, there’s a major law passed in Australia, which we’ll get to. And a trial has just started, in the state of California, against social-media companies, and that seems really significant. Talk me through what’s going on in California.

That’s right. These companies were given near-blanket immunity [from liability] for their actions back in the nineties. Section 230, the Communications Decency Act, said that we can’t sue Meta or TikTok because of what someone else posted on Meta or TikTok.

As a First Amendment idea?

It was actually done to incentivize the companies to moderate. The companies were afraid that if they take anything down, they become responsible for every single [piece of content]. So Congress said, “Go ahead and take down porn, and don’t worry—no one can sue you if you leave something up.” They wanted to give them more freedom of action.

It was a good idea originally, but the courts have interpreted it so widely. So you have all these parents with dead kids, and, in many cases, it’s just crystal clear. I mean, the kid got sextorted on Snapchat and was dead that night. That wasn’t a correlation. That was causation. You have a happy eleven-year-old girl, she gets on Instagram, and a few weeks later she’s developing an eating disorder.

So you have all these parents whose kids have been killed or damaged, and not one has ever gotten justice. Not one has ever even been able to face Meta in court. Meta has never faced a jury. None of these companies have ever faced a jury, because they keep saying, “Section 230, you can’t touch us.”

Now, how insane is it that the makers of one of the largest consumer products in the world—that is the one that most children use, that seems to be harming and killing a lot of them—can never be held responsible for their actions?

Do you have any numbers for this?

We know from Snap that they were getting ten thousand reports of sextortion from their users in 2022. And that wasn’t ten thousand a year, that was ten thousand a month. And, as they said themselves, this is probably the tip of the iceberg, because most people don’t report. And the kids—the boys who kill themselves—they don’t report, either. And with A.I. automating sextortion it’s going to go way up.

When we look at harms to mental health, we tend to find twenty to thirty per cent of the girls are saying, “It harmed my mental health.” The direct harms and the indirect harms are at such a scale that this could plausibly have caused the big increases, in 2012, of mental illness.

So what’s happening in California?

The thousands of cases of parents who are suing can’t be combined into a class-action suit, because class-action suit requires that all the plaintiffs have been harmed in the same way. And in this case the stories are all a little different. So they’ve created what’s called multi-district litigation, in which several thousand cases will be heard by a single judge, a single court, in California.

Now, of course, that’s impossible. So the idea is the two sides argue about which cases to consider. They pick bellwether cases. Those cases go to trial in front of a jury. And then based on what those jury trials are it’ll kind of be clear which way everything has to go. So that’s where we are.

What’s the desirable outcome?

The desirable outcome is that a jury, which decides questions of fact, decides that social media is addictive and it was designed to maximize engagement. They use various tricks to, basically, addict kids.

When you say “tricks,” what do you mean?

Oh, you ever notice that on an iPhone, when you pull down, like, you want to check your e-mail, it kind of bounces up and you get new ones?

Yeah.

That was literally copied from slot machines. Literally.

I work with a lot of people in their twenties and thirties, and when I brought up your book a couple of years ago it seemed to some of them that it was rather censorious—yet another version of “kids these days with their loud rock-and-roll music,” or “it was all better before.” The same thing that you might’ve heard about television by people who had grown up on radio.

Yeah, the main argument that I get is, Oh, this is just another moral panic about whatever technology the kids are using. And as you and I talked about last time that’s a perfectly legitimate argument. I have to show why this time is different.

The big difference I’ve come to see is this. Screens have been around for a long time. Screens are good ways of presenting stories. Screens have a role in education. If you watch a movie with your kid, that’s great. A long story on a screen, across the room, that’s wonderful.

That’s not this.

That’s not this. The difference here is behaviorist conditioning. So, with the television, there’s no stimulus-response reinforcement loop. You watch, you’re entertained, you might get into the story. It’s a very pleasant state, to be into a great fictional story. That’s what art does—it takes us out of ourselves into an imaginary world. That’s great. But, when you give your child a touchscreen device, what the child quickly figures out is that if they touch something, they get something, and then they learn to touch to optimize the getting. And the getting is dopamine—quick dopamine.

So it’s not just the glow of the screen; it’s the reactivity of it.

That’s right. So if you just played thirty-minute videos on a video player, it would be pretty much like television was. But instead what you have is a Skinner box. B. F. Skinner was an important psychologist from about the nineteen-twenties or thirties through about the sixties. He would create these boxes—he would put a pigeon or a rat in it. By giving them reinforcement on a variable ratio reward schedule he could very quickly take control over their behavior and make them dance, make them learn to play Ping-Pong. I mean, he could do amazing things. And when you give your kid a smartphone it is a behaviorist-conditioning machine.

So anyone who says, “Oh, this is just like [the moral panic over] comic books”—no, this is really, really different from comic books. I just read you a bunch of surveys where the kids themselves say, “This is harming us.” They say, “We wish it never existed.” Half of them wish TikTok had never been invented. Nobody was saying that about comic books. So I understand people assuming that this is just another old man shaking his fist at the clouds, but this time’s really, really different.

I met with some leaders of Apple, and I raised a couple of your main points.

What’d they say?

“Turn it off.” You know, ration your time, be more logical about how you use it. It’s a great machine, you just have to, you know… They were, I have to say, pretty blasé about it.

That’s right. As a social psychologist, my rule is that, if one person is doing something bad or stupid, that person might be bad or stupid. But if all of us are doing something that seems bad or stupid it’s probably a bad situation that’s making us all behave this way.

We have a lot of experience with addictive products. We know a lot about gambling and how it ruins people’s lives. Not everyone is susceptible, but a lot are. Same with alcohol. Same with cigarettes. And rule No. 1 of addictive substances is: We don’t let companies give them to kids. We say, “Adults, we’re going to trust you to self-regulate, and ten percent of you will be severely damaged, but that’s your choice.” My God, we don’t say that about kids.

Do you think your subject—your obsession of late—is related to something that concerns me very much, which is the decline of reading? We see all this information, these statistics, about the number of people who have or have not read one book in the past year.

Yes. This, actually, I now believe, is the biggest damage. When I was writing “The Anxious Generation,” I focussed on the mental-health damage, because that’s where the evidence was best. And I mention attention fragmentation, I mention addiction, but I don’t have a lot on it. The book comes out and everyone begins talking about how they can’t pay attention anymore. And it’s not just kids. Adults are beginning to say that they can’t pay attention. And then we start hearing—

I’m telling you, it’s hard for me! I’m a professional reader.

It’s everyone I talk to.

And, as I told you before we went on the air, I have to take my phone and put it in the kitchen so that I can, in the other room, read manuscripts, read a book. And it strikes me that the rise of the phone and all it implies is the greatest experiment in human consciousness, in a sense, that hasn’t been thought through.

Absolutely.

It’s just speeding sixty miles an hour into our lives and carrying us along.

With effects far beyond what we can imagine.

The key neurotransmitter here is dopamine. Dopamine is wonderful, and we want our kids to experience a lot of slow dopamine. Slow dopamine is: your kid is trying to build a tree house, and at first he fails, and then he makes some progress, which feels really good. And so he’s motivated to work harder, and then he fails again. And over time he eventually finishes, and boy, what satisfaction that is. So that’s how you raise an adult: you give them a lot of experiences of slow dopamine. They learn to set goals and pursue them.

Here’s how you undermine that: Make available to every child, from the age of two, an iPad. And what the child will quickly learn unconsciously is they’re looking at something, and within eight seconds, they will know, this is kind of interesting, but it’s not—swipe. Oh, wow, this is so funny. Oh, this is great. Quick dopamine, quick dopamine. They go someplace else.

This is the experience that young people have had since birth, now. Kids are given iPads routinely when they’re in their strollers.

So this is not just crabby college professors whining about their students not reading “Middlemarch” in a week.

No, this is the subversion of the ability to pay attention on a species-wide level. And as one of my students said, because I showed her that Atlantic article about how students aren’t reading books anymore—she said, “Yeah, I pick up a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok.” Because, again, you’ve been on this book for eight seconds and it’s not that interesting, but the thing in my pocket is a lot more interesting—quick dopamine, quick dopamine.

So this is what we’ve done. And this is even worse for the boys, because for the boys, it’s video games, it’s porn, it’s vaping, it’s gambling, it’s sports betting. So for boys, it’s open season on their dopamine systems. And this is going to make it very hard for them to develop executive function, follow goals, be useful as employees or spouses.

You came in today and put in front of me a paper that you’ve said is the most important research you’ve done. It’s called “Social Media Is Harming Young People at a Scale Large Enough to Cause Changes at the Population Level.” At The New Yorker, we wouldn’t call that a good print title—it would be a good S.E.O. title. But tell me what this report is all about, that you and your co-author, Zachary Rausch, have published this year.

Here’s a quote from Mark Zuckerberg, when he was questioned under oath in the U.S. Senate, January 31, 2024. He says: “Mental health is a complex issue and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” His claim, in multiple places, is that it’s just a correlation and you can’t prove that there’s causation.

Zach and I have laid out seven different lines of evidence. We’re trying to reframe the argument as one that can actually be solved. We do have ways of knowing if A caused B in the law and in social science. So we have lots of studies, surveys of young people. What do they say? Do young people think that social media is great for their mental health? Absolutely not. So this is line one: what the victims say. And in Exhibit A we present a bunch of surveys of young people.

And these are surveys done by whom?

Pew, Gallup, Common Sense Media, many international outlets as well. We cover international research as well. Pew, which is probably the main source of evidence here, in 2024, found that one-quarter of girls say that social media harms their mental health. One-third say it makes them feel worse about their lives. Fifty per cent say it harms their sleep. It all comes back to this question of correlation versus causation. So line one is what the victims say.

Line two is what the witnesses say, and that’s the parents, the teachers, the psychologists, the psychiatrists. They have very negative views of this. They see it up close. They say, “This is causing anxiety disorders. This is harming my patients.”

And then the third line is what the perpetrators say. If a prosecutor is laying the case out in court and he says to the jury, “I have here texts from Frank, the alleged perpetrator, in which he says to a buddy, ‘I’m going to mug Carol at three o’clock.’ ” And then he has a text saying, “I mugged Carol at three o’clock. Look at all the loot I got”—would that be evidence of causation, or is that just a correlation?

We have quote after quote [showing knowledge of harm] from inside the companies. I’ll just read a couple very briefly.

From TikTok, an internal research report: “Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skill, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy,” and it correlates with increased anxiety, and it goes on and on. So they know that they are hurting kids. They say the product in itself has compulsive use baked into it. They designed it to be addictive, and it’s addictive.

Snap, I already gave you the ten thousand reports of sextortion a month. Meta: “There are reasons to worry about self-control and use of our products, and”—

Wait, who’s speaking here?

So this is a member of Meta’s core data-science team and a senior data scientist at Meta having a conversation: “Without providing much more value, how to keep someone returning over and over to the same behavior each day? Intermittent rewards are most effective. Think slot machines.” They talk about it. They maximize for engagement.

Let’s talk about another country where something has been done about this. Late last year, Australia enacted a new law requiring age verification for social-media users. I think that’s the first national law of its kind.

Yes, it was.

What does this verification look like, and how is it working?

The Australia bill was very carefully drafted. They commissioned a former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Robert French, to figure out how it would be done. And it specifically says that it’s up to the companies to do it. It’s their responsibility. And it specifically says the companies cannot only ask for a government I.D. They have to offer an alternate way [to authenticate]. And there already were dozens of companies that offer alternate ways.

Wait, how does it work?

So the idea is: you want to open an account on Instagram. You put in your birthday and it then kicks you over to a page that says, “Here are four ways that you can validate that you’re old enough.”

So it’s not an honor system. Yes, I’m eighteen, on we go.

That’s right. Until December 10th, which is when it went into effect, the world was on the honor system. Porn, “Are you eighteen?” “Yes.” “You’re in.” So that began to end on December 10th.

Why did this happen first in Australia?

It just so happens that the wife of the Premier of South Australia read “The Anxious Generation” soon after it came out. And she said to her husband, Peter—Peter Malinauskas—“You got to read this book, and then you’ve got to effing do something about it.” And he did. And he called up Robert French and said, “How could we do this?” And they did it.

It wasn’t an ideologically divided issue?

It’s always bipartisan. Always. In every country, the left and the right are working together.

How is it coming along in Australia?

Here’s what we know. Julie Inman Grant, their e-safety commissioner, put out a press release about three or four weeks ago. She said all ten of the covered platforms have complied. They took down 4.7 million accounts from the 2.5 million Australian kids in that age range. And, of course, some are getting around it with V.P.N.s. Although I heard from someone who’s studying it—V.P.N. usage went way up at first, but it came way back down, because the kids want to check their social media thirty times a day, and if you have to load up a V.P.N. it’s a bit of friction. So of course kids are still getting around it, but as Julie pointed out: We’re trying to change the norms of a nation, the norms of childhood. We won’t really know the full effect for ten or twenty years.

How does it affect schools and phones?

So, two things. One is locking up the phones in the morning, a phone-free school policy, and that has magical effects—transformative effects. Some schools don’t implement it well, they don’t enforce it well, and then there’s cheating. But in schools that enforce it reasonably well the results are always spectacular. The thing that you always hear is: We hear laughter in the hallways again. The lunchroom is so loud. Kids are laughing.

That sounds too good to be true. Do we know this to be the case?

First of all, it’s very hard to find an account anywhere of this backfiring. And that would be newsworthy. There are a lot of efforts to measure what’s going on. Angela Duckworth, at Penn, is doing a major assessment, and she showed me some preliminary data in which the schools that used special phone lockers—that really took the phones away for the day—got the best results, in terms of teacher reports, academic outcomes. And the ones that used Yondr pouches got good results—not as good. And the ones that use a backpack policy, which a lot of schools do, unfortunately—“Keep it in your backpack, don’t take it out.” Look, if you’re a cocaine addict, and you’re told, “You can keep your cocaine with you all day long.” . . . So, yeah, it does seem to be working incredibly well.

The biggest argument against the Australian policy, or bringing the Australian policy to the United States, is a First Amendment argument. Explain the First Amendment argument and why you disagree with it.

So of course the First Amendment is that Congress shall make no law restricting the freedom of speech. And the companies argue that any kind of regulation is going to stop somebody from speaking and therefore violates the First Amendment. But the law already says that you have to be thirteen to sign a contract. This isn’t about who can say what. It’s about contract law. And right now, the law says that you have to be thirteen before a company can take your data without your parents’ knowledge or consent. And the Australian law says, first of all, thirteen was too low. For a child to sign a contract, they have to be sixteen. Oh, and guess who has to enforce the age limit? It’s not the child. It’s the company. So I don’t see any First Amendment—

The way a liquor store needs to see a driver’s license.

That’s right. It can’t be up to the parents to keep their kids out of liquor stores and strip clubs. It has to be the person at the door.

Now, the people being harmed by these things are not just thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen year olds. It’s even geezers like us, Jonathan, arguably. Are we left to our own devices?

We pretty much are, at least as far as I’m concerned. What I mean by that is: I’m an American, I have some generally libertarian tendencies. I don’t want to tell adults what to do. Adults can make their own choices.

How do we maintain some of the real connection and community that young people do find online?

Thanks for asking that, because this is one of the main arguments I get. It’s: thank God for social media. How could they ever connect if they didn’t have social media? How could they find information? To which I say, Yeah, kids need to connect. And the best way to connect is in person. And the second best way is by telephone or Zoom or FaceTime. And the worst way to connect is by posting something and having it be public and having people comment on it. That seems to be counterproductive. That seems to cause anxiety. That does not make people feel connected.

What I have found from talking to my students and to young people is that they’re afraid that they will be seen as a freak if they don’t have Instagram—because everyone has Instagram and Snapchat—but in fact the ones who go without it, other kids, when they talk to them, almost always say, “Wow, I wish I could do that. Wow, what’s it like?”

We’ve discussed what’s happening in Australia. What’s it going to take for anything like that to come to the United States? What’s the position of the Administration?

Two things. First, as soon as my book came out, mothers jumped into action, pressed for political action. We got huge amounts of reform in the states. Many states have taken action on phone-free schools, on regulating social media. Here in New York, our governor, Kathy Hochul, has been great on all these issues. So there’s been a huge amount of action at the state level, a huge amount of action around the world.

There’s only one place that I know of where nothing is happening, and that’s Congress. Now, what’s the role of the Administration? Because the tech moguls have been buddying up with President Trump, many people assume—and I saw this all over Europe. People are afraid to regulate social media because they think that Trump will come after them or put tariffs on them. But here’s the thing that I want everyone to notice about this. Yes, Donald Trump and Elon Musk will be very upset if you try to do content moderation and say what counts as hate speech. But if you’re protecting kids they actually have shown a lot of signs of support. The only thing America has ever done to protect kids [from social media] is the Take It Down Act, which was pushed by Melania. And the Kids Online Safety Act, the only act that ever almost made it to law a year or two ago, Donald Trump, Jr., tweeted support of it. Linda Yaccarino, the C.E.O. of X, tweeted support of it, and Elon Musk amplified her tweet. So I think the people in the Trump order—

Those seem like baby steps, though.

Well, passing KOSA would be huge, because we’ve never done much to protect kids ever. And so if we could do something in the U.S. Congress—

So you see the potential of a coherent, Trump Administration-led piece of legislation, analogous to what’s going on in Australia?

Raising the age would be a bigger step. And so that might take a while longer.

Have you ever talked to anybody in the Administration?

I’ve talked not directly with Trump, but with people in the office of the Vice-President, and . . . We have some contacts with people in or near the Administration.

And what are those conversations like?

Well, they’re interested in it, because again, everyone has kids. Everyone sees the threat. Parents everywhere see this as the biggest threat.

You have the same kind of conversations on the Democratic side?

Largely, yes. The Democrats are—

You’re saying “largely.”

Yeah. So what happens is that Meta puts out a set of talking points to inflame the right, and that is censorship, censorship, censorship. And they have a set of talking points to inflame the left. And that is that social media is a lifeline for L.G.B.T.Q. kids. And that is not true. The internet was a lifeline for them. Kids who were isolated, often in rural areas, when the internet came in—now they could find information, they could find others. There are all kinds of ways they were not isolated. The internet’s amazing.

Social media is just a small part of the internet, and it’s an incredibly toxic part. So Zach Rausch and I have an article in The Atlantic with Lennon Torres, who’s a trans activist, and Lennon talks about what happened to her when she was transitioning. And we have data showing that L.G.B.T.Q. kids do use social media more than any other group, but they’re also much more likely to report having been harmed by it. Social media is not a lifeline for L.G.B.T.Q. kids. The internet is.

Who’s your best political ally?

I would say the first one who stepped forward was Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She contacted me right away after the book came out. And then also Kathy Hochul, around the same time. So it’s female governors, or the First Lady of Virginia. Mothers are quicker off the mark. They were desperate to do something, and a lot of them have.

Interesting.

I would say female politicians, female governors—but lots of male governors, heads of state, as well.

Do you have any allies in the tech world? In other words, is there anybody unexpected who leads YouTube or TikTok and they say, “You know what? You’re right. I want to work with you to make this better and not just try to combat you.”

There’s one so far—Bill Ready, the C.E.O. of Pinterest. He reached out to me weeks after the book came out. He himself had, when he took over at Pinterest, just cut off the social features for everyone under sixteen [because of safety concerns]. And he just said, “No more of that.” So Bill Ready has been great.

You’ve not heard from Tim Cook, at Apple, or Elon Musk, or . . . ?

No, none of them. I had two meetings with Mark Zuckerberg in 2019 and 2020. We debated the issue of causality versus correlation, but they have not reached out to me.

How will A.I. affect not only your work but all of us, in terms of what we’ve been discussing?

Yeah. So leaving aside all the existential risks, all the ways that it could lead to human extinction. Let’s just talk about human development.

Social media hacked our attention and took most of it. Young people, nearly half of them say that they’re online almost constantly. So social media made off with most human attention, not just for kids but for older people as well, but not as much. And that should be the crime of the century, and that is debilitating.

But A.I. is going to be much worse, because A.I. is going to hack our attachments. We have an attachment system in the parents and the child, and the infant must, with repeated turn-taking, serve and return interactions. You do something, the kid does something back, you do something back. That is what develops the brain. That is what develops the internal working models of attachment. If you have secure attachment, you’re well set up to have adult romantic relationships in which you are stable, not incredibly difficult to be with.

Now that we have A.I. in Teddy bears and in every social-media product—

What is A.I. in Teddy bears?

Oh, it’s a Teddy bear that you can talk with. It’s a chatbot in a Teddy bear. It’ll become your best friend. It’ll be supportive.

Great. That’s fantastic.

Right. So chatbots already have a death toll. We already know about kids who were talked into suicide, or at least encouraged to kill themselves and hide it. And we’re now going to raise our children with it. It’s going to be really good at entertaining them. We’re all busy because we have so much to do on our phones.

I sense another book coming from you, Jon.

I think things are moving too fast for another book. I may not write another book. I’ve got to just write articles.

Interestingly, you’ve gone from subject to subject over your adult and academic life, but this seems like now the work of a lifetime.

Yeah. This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, because this is the biggest—

What does that mean?

I have a contract to write a book on democracy, called “Life After Babble: Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share,” about what social media is doing to liberal democracy, how it may be incompatible with it. I’d love to write that book, and I might still write it. But by the time I write it everything could be so radically different in our country.

How would you summarize it?

I would summarize it by saying that democracy is a conversation, and when that conversation was in the Agora, in Greece, they had one kind of democracy. And when that conversation was during the Gutenberg era, which took place in print and in places like The New Yorker, and CBS News, it was a different kind of conversation. And now we’re out of the Gutenberg era—we’re into the network era. We will never again know what’s true. It’ll never be possible to have a shared reality.

So that’s not the fault of Donald Trump. He’s a symptom of it, you’re saying.

He is the first person who knew how to navigate the new world and to create some reality.

And exploit it.

That’s right. If not for Twitter, he could not have become President. But just as it is said that both John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were extremely adept at the age of television. And Neil Postman writes about this, the great twentieth-century media theorist.

“Amusing Ourselves to Death.”

Exactly. And so in the same way, when that conversation moves on to Twitter, what happens to it? Read Federalist No. 10, where the Founding Fathers worried about people’s ability to get pulled off into nonsense and craziness, and the ability of a demagogue to inflame the passions. They tried to design safeguards for it, but, in the social-media age, those safeguards are gone.

So that genie can’t go back in the bottle, either.

Can’t go back in the bottle. And that’s why the subtitle of the book is “adapting to a world we may never again share.” ♦

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Two weeks after the United States and Israel launched an air war on Iran, there has been no let up in the conflict—or its financial repercussions. On Thursday, Iran’s new Supreme Leader said that his country would keep closed the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane through which about a fifth of the world’s oil flows, and more vessels in the Persian Gulf were attacked, including two oil tankers that were set ablaze off the coast of Iraq. On world markets, the price of a barrel of crude jumped to more than a hundred dollars.

Here in the U.S., the price of gasoline has risen by about more than twenty per cent since the war began, and energy analysts warn that it could rise a lot further if the Strait isn’t reopened. The Dow has fallen by about four per cent. Donald Trump, having plunged the country into a potentially disastrous war, with no clear rationale or exit plan, is flailing around for ways to mitigate its economic consequences. On Thursday, he suggested in a social-media post that the U.S., as the world’s largest oil producer, makes a lot of money when prices go up—an argument that even the most slavish G.O.P. congressman facing a reëlection campaign might hesitate to embrace.

Perhaps the most startling thing about the whole situation is that the Trump Administration was apparently surprised by, and unprepared for, Iran’s capability to inflict economic pain on the U.S. and its allies. This despite the fact that during a showdown in Trump’s first term the regime in Tehran used the same tactics of threatening to block the Strait and of attacking oil infrastructure in neighboring Gulf states that are allied with the U.S. Whether out of arrogance, capriciousness, or collective amnesia, this recent history was ignored.

In 2018, after rashly pulling out of the nuclear deal that the Obama Administration had negotiated, Trump launched a “maximum pressure campaign” against the Islamic Republic, which included extensive sanctions on its oil industry, the country’s biggest revenue generator. The response from Tehran was robust. In February, 2019, the Navy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said that if Iran had no buyers for its oil it would take military steps to close the Strait. Ultimately, it backed off—it was able to continue exporting oil to China and other countries that ignored the U.S. sanctions—but the government and its foreign proxies did carry out a campaign of aggression in and around the Gulf. In May and June of 2019, four oil tankers docked in the United Arab Emirates were sabotaged and two freight vessels, one Japanese-owned and the other Norwegian-owned, were damaged by Iranian mines in the Gulf of Oman, which sits below the Strait. Months later, in Saudi Arabia, drone attacks struck oil-pumping stations that were operated by Aramco, the state-run oil giant. According to a report from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, Tehran “meant to send a message to the Gulf states that if they continue to encourage the United States to cut off Iran’s oil sector, Iran will take actions to harm their ability to export oil.” The report continued, “The message to the United States is that the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign is not without costs, and if the United States seeks to pursue this approach, Iran will take steps that have a negative impact on the global economy.”

At the time, there was speculation that tensions between the U.S. and Iran could spiral into military conflict—Mike Pompeo, then Trump’s Secretary of State, had described one of Iran’s attacks on Aramco facilities as an “act of war.” The Columbia report considered various scenarios, including small-scale hostilities in the Gulf and a major war that closed the Strait of Hormuz and drew in other countries in the region. In the latter scenario, the price of a barrel of crude could spike up from sixty-five dollars to “$110–$170 after one month, $95–$125 after six months,” the report said. The good news, it went on, was that “none of the parties are interested in pursuing massive escalation and have shown little will to do so even as the crisis in the region has worsened.”

Enter Trump 2.0, whose addled mind seems to have difficulty keeping a thought in place for a few days, let alone for the six years that have passed since the previous showdown in the Gulf. A few weeks ago, in his State of the Union address, Trump pointed out how the price of a gallon of gasoline “reached a peak of over six dollars a gallon in some states under my predecessor—it was, quite honestly, a disaster.” Three days later, Trump signed the order for Operation Epic Fury, with eminently predictable results. Having survived the initial U.S.-Israeli onslaught, the Iranian regime rolled out an expanded version of its playbook from 2019, exploiting its choke hold on the Strait, while launching missile and drone attacks on U.S. bases and energy infrastructure in the Gulf states.

With the Strait effectively blocked and hundreds of tankers stranded, many millions of barrels of oil are stuck at sea. And as onshore storage facilities have filled up Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait have shut off some of their wells because they have nowhere to put the oil they produce. In volume terms, the hit to global supply is now the largest ever, energy analysts say, and, the longer the conflict goes on, the worse it will get. On an corporate earnings call last week, Amin Nasser, the chief executive of Aramco, said that a lengthy closure of the Strait would have “catastrophic consequences” for the world’s oil markets. Gas prices haven’t hit six dollars yet, but in parts of California they have come close. At a national level, the average price has risen from $2.94 a month ago to about $3.60, according to the American Automobile Association.

Last week, Trump floated the idea of the U.S. government providing insurance contracts to vessels to sail through the Strait—a proposal that seems to be in limbo. On Wednesday, the Paris-based International Energy Agency announced that its members, which include the United States, other Western nations, and their allies, would release more than four hundred million barrels of oil from emergency stocks to alleviate supply disruptions—the biggest such release ever seen. In the circumstances, this was a sensible move, but if the White House had been hoping that it would immediately bring down oil prices it was disappointed. Despite the announcement from the I.E.A., the price of crude closed the day up nearly five per cent.

The previous time that Trump almost blundered into an economic catastrophe was on “Liberation Day,” nearly a year ago, when, from the Rose Garden, he announced punitive tariffs on dozens of U.S. trading partners. Financial markets, including the U.S. bond market, which lies at the heart of the global financial system, promptly went into a tailspin. Fortunately for Trump, two of his top economic aides—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—were able to persuade him to back down and pause the tariffs before the cracks in the bond market developed into a full-blown crisis. Subsequently, many of the levies were modified. Thus, the legend of “TACO”—“Trump Always Chickens Out”—was born. (Robert Armstrong, a journalist at the Financial Times, came up with the phrase.) On Wall Street, TACO still has many believers, and not without reason. Trump remains obsessed with the markets. And with the midterms on the horizon the last thing that he and other Republicans want to talk about is higher gas prices.

But it turns out that doing a wartime TACO is considerably harder than doing a peacetime one. The decision to cease hostilities isn’t Trump’s alone; Israel and Iran also have a say. The potential loss of face is much larger: at least seven American service members have been killed in Operation Epic Fury, while more than a hundred have been wounded. And oil wells and refineries can’t be turned back on overnight. “Many processes are out of (Trump’s) hand,” Marko Kolanović, a financial commentator who was formerly co-head of global research at JPMorgan Chase, remarked online last week.

It’s not all bad news for the TACO Man. Among economists, there is a consensus that the U.S. economy is much less vulnerable to higher oil prices than it was in the nineteen-seventies, when two big price spikes that originated in the Middle East both predated deep recessions. Back then, most American families drove gas guzzlers, and manufacturing, which uses a lot of energy, contributed about twice as much to G.D.P. than it does today. In other words, the economy isn’t nearly as energy intensive as it used to be, and, for that reason, most economists don’t believe higher oil prices alone will plunge it into a recession. In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, energy prices rose to even higher levels than they’ve reached this month, and the U.S. economy kept growing.

The economic optimists present a strong argument, but it isn’t infallible. In 2022, the economy was still rebounding strongly from COVID, with the vestiges of a big fiscal stimulus at its back. In the past year, G.D.P. has continued to rise, but job growth has virtually ceased, raising questions about the economy’s momentum. An extended period of higher energy prices would hit low- and middle-income households, many of which are already struggling to keep up with the cost. It could also feed through to higher inflation, which could prompt the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates on hold, or even raise them. Assuming the Senate confirms Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee to replace Jerome Powell as Fed chair, an interest hike seems like an unlikely outcome, but the possibility of the Fed not responding to higher prices also raises awkward possibilities. If investors come to think that the central bank is going soft on inflation, there could be a big sell-off in the bond market. That would leave Trump in the same predicament he was in last year after Liberation Day.

Nothing is certain, except the fact that the President is floundering, making conflicting statements from one day to the next about how long the war will last. As it continues, rule at the whim of a strongman seems to be giving way to rule by slapstick. Growing up in England, I spent countless hours watching the comedies of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, which the BBC showed all the time. In each show, the two nitwits would set out on some caper, which would inevitably go horribly wrong, leaving them broke, or tied up, or in jail, or hanging over a cliff, or some other situation of great peril. At which point, Ollie would turn to Stan and say, “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”

Trump is turning into Oliver Hardy. Earlier this week, he said that he launched the war based on information he received from Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio that led him to believe Iran was preparing to attack the United States. The search for the fall guy is on. Only the truth is we are all Trump’s fall guys—not just Americans facing higher fuel bills but the inhabitants of other countries, particularly energy-importing ones, such as Japan, Germany, China, and India, which will bear the brunt of higher prices. Hopefully, that will be the full extent of the economic damage caused by Trump’s recklessness. It can’t be guaranteed. ♦

In 2006, Ryan Gosling, then in his twenties, starred in a tough-minded, low-budget drama called “Half Nelson,” in which he played a middle-school teacher hobbled by a crack addiction. Years later, the actor, now a fully fledged star, blasted off into space; the film was the Neil Armstrong drama “First Man” (2018), and it climaxed with a weepy reconstruction of the 1969 moon landing. Now, in “Project Hail Mary,” Gosling has come full circle: he is Ryland Grace, a middle-school teacher who blasts off into space. There are differences, to be sure. Grace’s destination is the star Tau Ceti, roughly 11.9 light-years from Earth. No crack is smoked; an astronaut’s life has enough highs. (There’s also an onboard vodka stash that doesn’t last long.) Weeping, though, you can count on. Gosling is a beautiful crier, and his character’s journey seems destined to end in tears.

The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, clearly want us to shed a few of our own. They also want to make us laugh, and their instincts are often at lumpy cross-purposes. Early on, Grace finds himself mourning his two crewmates, Yáo Li-Jie (Ken Leung) and Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub), who have perished mid-journey, leaving him all alone. Grim stuff—or it would be, if not for a vein of humor that throbs here and elsewhere, keeping the full sting of loss at bay. Grace, you see, has just emerged from a years-long induced coma. Looking like the Unabomber, he bumbles and flails about, barely able to remember his name, his mission, or his late colleagues. He delivers patchy eulogies that feel half sad, half jokey, and more than a little half-hearted. Consider Claire Denis’s rather chillier space opera, “High Life” (2018), in which another astronaut (Robert Pattinson) jettisoned his dead crewmates with far less ceremony. He knew he was alone. Not so Grace, who always seems aware of an audience on the other side of the movie screen, waiting to be entertained.

“Project Hail Mary” is the most exasperatingly insistent crowd-pleaser I’ve seen in a while. It serves up an elaborate science-fiction plot in easily digestible bites, often with a juicy one-liner or a side order of pratfall. Both the title and the quippy-wonky tone come from an Andy Weir novel, from 2021, and, like the book, the film uses Grace’s temporary amnesia as a structuring device. We are jerked between past and present as his backstory gets filled in, one jogged memory at a time. Early on, we flash back to Earth, where Grace is teaching junior-high science; his latest lesson is about sound frequencies, and you can rest assured that it will appear on the film’s midterm exam. There’s a pre-apocalyptic chill in the air. The sun is being devoured by energy-hungry microbes, called Astrophage, and the resulting cooling threatens to wipe out much of Earth’s population. This isn’t just a local problem; the Astrophage are eating stars everywhere, like ants at an intergalactic picnic. Lights out for the universe.

Enter Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), a government official with a barbed half smile and a will of iron, who drags Grace back to the world of top-flight science, which he left behind years before, after flaming out of academia. Stratt is the head of Project Hail Mary, a global rescue effort to stop the star-eaters before it’s too late. (One of the film’s most casually poignant touches is its matter-of-fact vision of international coöperation and competent leadership. Talk about science fiction.) A crew will be sent to study Tau Ceti, a star that seems resistant to Astrophage infection. Stratt needs the world’s best minds at her disposal, and Grace is one of them. But he’s reluctant to get involved, and flashbacks reveal the long, improbable arc of how he relents—how this stubborn, self-deprecating oddball, with a doctorate in molecular biology but no astronaut experience, wound up lost in space, with the fate of the world in his nervous grip.

Mercifully, in writing the novel, Weir realized that his Grace was not sufficient for us. And so, not far from Tau Ceti, an enormous alien spacecraft looms into view. In Lord and Miller’s adaptation, it’s an impressively elongated affair—made from a substance called xenonite, though I’d have guessed dry spaghetti noodles—and you can discern, in the aliens’ handiwork, the same whimsical sense of play that animated Lord and Miller’s “Lego Movie” (2014). A bridge extends from ship to ship, and Grace meets a squat, faceless, many-legged creature, like a crustacean made of sandstone. Their first encounter occurs on opposite sides of a transparent wall, and all it takes is an impromptu Marx Brothers routine—Grace gently dances, the alien follows suit—to confirm that they mean each other no harm.

The creature’s language consists largely of gentle, high-pitched squeals, difficult but not impossible to decode, and Grace, using a laptop, manages to fashion a rudimentary system of communication. At last, the alien—brought wonderfully to life, with an amusingly robotic voice and skittery movements, by the puppeteer James Ortiz—can tell his story. He is an engineer from the planet Erid, which is also threatened by Astrophage, and, like Grace, he is the lone survivor of his mission. And so begins a beautiful friendship, one that might save both their planets. “I’m gonna call you Rocky,” Grace says. Presumably, E.T. would have been too obvious.

Nearly every cinematic space voyage, however far flung, brushes up against familiar terrain. If this one reminds you of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” (2014), that’s no surprise: “Project Hail Mary” is nowhere near as mind-bending, but it has its share of Nolan-esque centrifugal set pieces and conceptual paradoxes. (One nicely circular irony: Grace’s ship is powered by Astrophage. The agent of Earth’s destruction is also the engine of its salvation.) Even more obvious are the echoes of “The Martian” (2015), another wryly funny tale of an astronaut cast adrift that was adapted by Goddard from a Weir novel. But the director there was Ridley Scott, and his streamlined professionalism kept the comic and the cosmic judiciously in check.

Lord and Miller are boisterous funnymen, with a flair for the exaggerated and the outlandish that feels born of their frequent work in animation. (They wrote and directed “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” from 2009, and co-produced the hugely successful “Spider-Verse” franchise.) Even within the live-action spectacle of “Project Hail Mary,” the directors aim for uncharted realms of goofball grandeur, as if they were bent on dramatizing the most serious human enterprise in the least serious manner possible. When Rocky temporarily moves into the earthling ship—unable to handle the new atmosphere, he shields himself inside a dodecahedron-shaped “ball”—he disdains Grace’s untidy habits and other human shortcomings. Grace, in turn, grouses about his new roomie in a series of video diaries, which will be sent back to Earth. “He’s growing on me,” Grace eventually admits, adding, “At least he’s not growing in me.” His companion expresses a more succinct version of the sentiment: “Rocky happy not alone.”

And so we find ourselves in an interspecies buddy comedy: “Smart and Smarter.” The buddies’ plan involves the retrieval of amoeba specimens from a celestial body orbiting Tau Ceti. This planet is a striking piece of production design, with a nicely retro matte-style finish, though it does have a gaseous swirl of pink and green that looks a bit like Planet “Wicked.” Lord and Miller, working with the cinematographer Greig Fraser, avoid the conventional visual language of the prestige space epic, with its sterile surfaces and zero-gravity tracking shots. When Grace first awakens on his ship, the film cuts hectically around, above, and below him, as if to approximate his mental and physical disorientation. But even after the grogginess wears off, there’s little sense of flow to the images; they don’t build or move hypnotically from one to the next, and they suggest a curious reluctance, on the part of the filmmakers, to maximize the possibilities of the big screen. Even their vision of outer space seldom imparts the sense of a terrifying, unknowable vastness.

As obstacles, reversals, and near-death experiences accumulate, the film balloons to two and a half hours—hardly overlong, you might think, for an epic of looming planetary destruction. But the audience’s good will is a precious, unstable resource, and the flippancy of “Project Hail Mary” expends it recklessly. All the more reason to be grateful for Sandra Hüller as Stratt, who keeps pulling the proceedings back to Earth in the best possible way. Hüller’s bone-dry reserve is effortlessly amusing, in a way that Gosling’s more strained antics are not, and Stratt’s prickly bond with Grace, brusque but not unkind, seems to foreshadow his future interactions with Rocky: they, too, must learn to speak the same language. There’s a fleeting yet sublime moment of connection one night, when Stratt, lowering her guard at a bar with her colleagues, croons a gorgeous cover of Harry Styles’s “Sign of the Times.” You have to wonder if the filmmakers were inspired by the actor’s great performance in “Toni Erdmann” (2016), in which she similarly turned a karaoke moment into the stuff of emotional revelation. “We gotta get away from here,” Hüller sings, and rightly so. She’s out of this world. ♦